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The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 3

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The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 3

At three o’clock Charlie Olson left Golovin for the 25-mile run to Bluff.  He fought his way through a blizzard with a gale wind of fifty miles an hour throwing him and his team of seven dogs from the trail time and time again.  The thermometer read thirty below zero, Olson’s hands froze, his dogs froze and stumbled, but they fought on through the night.  His vision obscured by the raging blizzard, Olson had to trust his lead dog to stay on the trail.  At 7:30 P.M., only four hours and fifteen minutes after leaving Golovin, he reached Bluff and passed the serum over to Gunnar Kasson.

Kasson ran the last 55-miles to Nome, to honor and fame, with 13 dogs in harness.  Somewhere along the trail he bypassed the next relay driver, Ed Rohn, who was waiting at Safety to take the serum on the final lap into Nome.  “Intentionally bypassed,” chuckled the old-timers many years later.

But, for Kasson, leaving Bluff at 10 o’clock in total darkness and an eighty-mile-an-hour wind-driven snowstorm, no landmark was familiar and he could have easily missed the roadhouse.  Dressed in seal mukluks that reached to his hips, sealskin pants, a reindeer parka and hood with a windbreaker over that, Kasson could still feel the sting of the wind.  Two of his dogs, longhaired veteran trail huskies, began to succumb to the weather and Kasson had to stop and buckle on their rabbit skins.  The sled kept tipping over in the soft snow; he couldn’t see; he didn’t really know where he was.

The only way for Kasson to survive, the only way he could even attempt to get the serum through the storm, was to give direction of the team to the leader, Balto.  Balto, one of Seppala’s Siberians, was a powerful, experienced leader, but Seppala had not taken him for this run because the six-year-old dog’s speed wasn’t as fast as it had been.  Kasson needed the leadership, however, and borrowed Balto from Seppala’s kennel.  Given his head in the worst weather, Balto put his nose down and sniffed and felt his way along the buried, invisible trail.  All Kasson could do was trust the dog’s instincts and experience.  The efforts of over one hundred and fifty other sled dogs and nineteen other drivers depended solely now on Balto.  The lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Alaskans depended on the doughty little sled dog and his team.

In the tradition of the great lead dogs, Balto, ears flattened against his head to keep out of the storm, nose working to pick out the trail, guided the team and the serum directly to Nome.

When they got there, at 5:30 in the morning on February 2, the half frozen Kasson collapsed beside battered, depleted dog team and began pulling ice from Balto’s feet.

“Balto,” he was heard to mumble… “Damn fine dog!”

In New York City’s Central Park a statue of Balto stands vigilant watch, keeping the accomplishments of sled dogs alive.  The inscription reads: “Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the winter of 1925.  Endurance.  Fidelity.  Intelligence.” R. Coppinger

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies Radio Show

The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 2

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A call for help was flashed across the wires and dog teams were posted at way stations along the route.  In an attempt to bring recognition to all the souls that braved the trail, the following account, in its entirety, was taken from Coppinger’s World of Sled Dogs: From Siberia to Sport Racing (Howell Book House 1977):

“The Alaskan Railroad sent a special train out of Anchorage, north to the end of the line in Nenana, with a small package of serum aboard.  Waiting at Nenana was William “Wild Bill” Shannon, the U.S. mail driver for the Northern Commercial Company.  He set out late on the 27th of January for Tolovana, 52-miles to the northwest, with a team of nine Malamutes, a big working team for those days.  The thermometer at the station read -50º.  The serum was wrapped in blankets to keep it from the damaging cold.

At noon on the 28th Shannon turned the serum over to Dan Green at Tolovana.  Green raced his eight dogs the 31-miles to Manley Hot Springs in weather featuring temperatures of –30º, and a wind of some twenty miles an hour: a chill factor of –70º for Green and his dogs.

At Manley Hot Springs, the Athabascan Indian Jonny Folger took over and ran 28-miles to Fish Lake with a team of eight dogs and the temperature still standing at thirty degrees below zero.

From Fish Lake to Tanana, Sam Joseph carried the serum 26-miles at an amazing average of nine miles an hour.  The temperature was dropping.

From Tanana to Kallads, 34-miles away, Titus Nicholi mushed his seven dogs through weather at forty below.  There Dave Corning took over in –42º temperatures; he averaged eight miles an hour for the 24 miles from Kallads to the Nine Mile cabin.

He was met by Edgar Kalland who raced his seven dogs to Kokrines, thirty miles away, with the temperature now at –44º.

From Kokrines to Ruby, another thirty miles, Harry Pitka fought his way through a white-out at 47 degrees below zero.  He somehow managed an incredible nine miles an hour.  At Ruby, Bill McCartney took the package and raced with his seven dogs the 28-miles to Whiskey Creek in slightly warming weather:  -43º now.

At Whiskey Creek, seven o’clock at night, Edgar Nollner continued on at –40º for the 24-miles to Galena, with seven dogs.

Edgar’s brother, George Nollner, carried the serum 18-miles from Galena to Bishop Mountain with the same seven dogs, and the temperatures began to plunge.  The dogs trotted the whole 42-miles for the Nollner brothers; it was too dark to lope.

At Bishop Mountain, the 22-year-old Athabascan Charlie Evans began with a team of nine dogs the run to Nulato, thirty miles away.  The temperature dived to 64 degrees below zero and the trip was a nightmare for Evans.  He had no rabbit skins to protect the vulnerable groin area of his dogs, and two of them began to freeze, even as they ran.  Loading the crippled huskies onto his sled, Evans continued on.  He ran in front of the sled, pulling on the traces, trying to help his seven remaining dogs.  Five hours after leaving Bishop Mountain he reached Nulato.  It was four o’clock in the morning and all he could manage was to carry his sick dogs into the cabin and collapse by the stove.  Recalling the event some fifty years later, Charlie Evans said, “It was real cold.”

Tommy Patsy loaded the serum from Evans’ sled onto his own and sped off into the darkness toward Kaltag, 36-miles distant.  Urging his team on at 58 degrees below zero, it took him three and a half hours to cover the distance.  He got there Friday noon, January 30th.  In less than three days, 13 dog teams had covered 377-miles.  They were a little over halfway to Nome.

At Kaltag, the trail left the Yukon River and headed over the mountains to the coast.  In the mountains, the weather grew worse.  The Athabascan River pilot Jackscrew took the serum at Kaltag and cursed his way through a blinding snowstorm at fifty below zero to Old Woman shelter cabin, forty miles away.  There he was met by Eskimo Victor Anagick who took off in blowing, drifting snow toward Unalakleet, 34-miles away on Norton Sound.

At Unalakleet, another Eskimo, Myles Gonangnan, was waiting, and set off in his turn with the serum for Shaktoolik.  He had to break trail for his eight-dog team through waist-high drifts for the entire forty miles.  They were traveling in one of the worst snowstorms in memory.  He made it in just under 12 hours and fell exhausted and frostbitten, but with the serum safe for the next sled.

Harry Ivanoff then started for Golovin.  Half a mile along to the trail the team picked up the scent of reindeer, and bedlam broke loose.  Fighting to straighten out his dogs, Ivanoff looked up to see Leonhard Seppala and his team of racing Siberians, the only such dogs in the relay, hustling down the trail.

Apparently the blizzard had interfered with communications and Nome thought there was no relay team available at Shaktoolik.  So Seppala had driven the team a good 150-miles, from Nome, to meet the precious package.  Ivanoff gave him the serum, and Seppala, turning back, chose the straight route across Norton Sound, a route traditionally avoided by dog drivers.  The high winds were pushing sea water up over the ice, which promised to break up at any moment and drift out into the Bering Sea, Seppala, serum and all.  But Seppala’s confidence in his proven fast dogs and his successful crossing of the creaking ice once that day stimulated his belief that he had a reasonable chance, with luck, to make it back across to Golovin and save hours, perhaps days.

In warming temperatures that made the ice more dangerous, Seppala sped off for Golovin, 91-miles west by the route across the Sound.  The little Norwegian and his lead dog Togo, made 84-miles that day.  Twenty of those miles were across the heaving, sloshing, breaking sea ice.  But Togo, the hero of many a sport sled dog race and veteran of many a trail, knew the dangers.  He also had the uncanny ability to begin carrying out Seppala’s wishes even before Seppala gave a command.  Togo led the fragile train of dogs, sled and driver as quickly as he could across the massive array of jagged, groaning ice floes.  They reached Isaacs Point, on the other side, late Saturday night.  There Seppala stopped to feed his team and tend to their raw, cut feet.  Continuing on [the] next morning in the blizzard, he met Charlie Olson at Golovin in mid-afternoon.  There was eighty miles left to go.

Tomorrow on the Dog Sledding Examiner: The Serum Run Part 3

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies Radio Show

The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 1

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The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day-Part 1

In 1925, the population of Nome, Alaska was just two thousand.  Most of the miners, prospectors and adventurers of the gold rush had moved on.  The city was the site of a potential catastrophe, an epidemic of diphtheria.  Diphtheria is a “specific, localized, and superficial bacterial infection.”  It produces a powerful and deadly toxin that in the first quarter of the twentieth century claimed over half the lives of anyone unlucky enough to contract it.  The residents of Nome were in dire danger, without an adequate supply of antitoxin the city’s prognosis was at best poor.

The challenges of delivering the twenty-five pound package of life-saving antitoxin were many.  It would have to be picked up from the railhead in Nenana and transported to Nome over six hundred seventy four miles of the “roughest and most desolate” terrain found anywhere on the planet.  The trip, which normally took twenty-five days, would have to be undertaken in just fifteen; in the middle of an arctic winter where the bone-chilling temperatures ranged from -19ºF to -64ºF.  To complicate matters it was dark most of the time in late January and early February.

Richard Byrd said, “The Eskimo husky still is, as he always has been, the one absolutely reliable means of polar advance.”  Rest assured it was this reliability that spared the lives of the citizenry of Nome.  Twenty or so brave mushers: natives, mail carriers and white men put their lives, and the lives of their dogs, on the line for the isolated city.  They did not risk it all for money, or for glory, but simply because it was the right thing to do.

Gunnar Kasson and Leonhard Seppala received most of the credit and glory associated with the Nome Serum Run; however, they were just a small part in a much larger, history-making adventure.  It was primarily Native Alaskans and mail drivers who weathered the biting cold and the blinding storms who conquered the brutal trail.  Those drivers were thanked by President Coolidge and even received a medal for their efforts, but they were mostly over-looked by the media.

The tale begins in January of 1925, in Nome, Alaska.  The only physician in Nome, Dr. Curtis Welch, discovered a case of the dreaded “Black Death” disease, diphtheria.  The doctor’s supply of antitoxin was very small, and Nome was the medical center for a district of some eleven thousand extremely vulnerable natives.

There was a supply of antitoxin in Anchorage, Alaska.  As previously alluded to, the difficulty was in transporting the serum to Nome.  There were two biplanes at that time in Alaska, the problem with using them was that not only were they disassembled for the winter, they were also both open-cockpit.  The days were short, and the weather was horribly cold.  The pilots were willing to give it a go, but it was decided that the risk to the only serum in Alaska was too high for such a reckless endeavor.  So just as the natives had done for centuries, the residents of Nome pinned their hope of survival on sled dogs.

Tomorrow: Part 2 of The Serum Run: Sled Dogs Save the Day

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush! You Huskies Radio Show

The Mounties

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The Mounties

Canada’s federal police force did not receive its current title until 1920.  It was originally called the Northwest Mounted Rifles.  However, the United States’ adverse reaction to what it felt was an “armed force” patrolling the United States-Canadian border precipitated the title being changed to the Northwest Mounted Police.

At the turn of the century the Mounted Police had been using dog teams in excess of twenty-five years to patrol three hundred thousand square miles of wilderness.  The first

dog team patrolled the vast region in 1873, searching for men who were illegally trading whiskey to the natives on the west shore of Lake Michigan.  The patrol was successful, with six men arrested, and an undisclosed amount of whiskey confiscated.

The stage was now set for a romanticism that would follow the “Mounties” for decades.  The excitement of danger and mystery would lead to what was to become a romantic exploitation of what was often a brutal job that these brave officers carried out.  Inspector Rivett-Carnac wrote the following article in 1938 for the RCMP Quarterly, which quelled most of the imagined romance associated with a patrol.

“I remember very well, some years ago, seeing a somewhat dramatic film about the North, in which the hero, riding on a sleigh, set off across the Barren Lands towards the Arctic Ocean, where he gallantly rescued a damsel in distress who was held captive by certain villainous characters.  Every time they appeared on the screen, the hero and his dogs were seen to be skimming over the snow at full gallop.  Despite the fact that the journey was one of some hundreds of miles…the sled carried no food for man or dog.  One could only assume that the driver in this instance was so confident of his dogs that he considered a few sandwiches in his hip pocket would be sufficient to sustain life until his objective was reached!”

As any musher knows, dog driving is not nearly as easy as that; a fact in which the good Inspector would certainly agree. The romance is certainly not apparent while traveling considerable distances.  Inspector Rivett-Carnac spoke of the hardships of long distance arctic travel in his article.  “Night after night in the snow at temperatures ranging to 60 degrees below zero…one’s feet having been cut or chafed by the snowshoe strings…bloodstained moccasins…the next day’s travels.”  He also noted that “Modern methods of transportation have penetrated the northern regions of late years. It is unlikely that the dog team as a means of transportation over the northern snows will ever become entirely obsolete, because, although it is a slow means of locomotion, it is one which will get the traveler to his destination–provided that his own powers are equal to those of his dogs.”

A mere thirty years later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police “forsook” their dog teams.  In 1969, the last official patrol of any distance by sled dog was taken; it was a regular, everyday trip in which Special Constable Peter Benjamin traveled for four weeks, with twenty-one dogs, the 500-miles from Old Crow to Fort McPherson and back.

Dog Sledding Legend Jean Bryar on Mushing Radio

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Dog Sledding Legend Jean Bryar on Mushing Radio

On the popular Mush! You Huskies Radio Show we are continuing our summer series on the dog sledding legends and those people that made this sport what it is today. This week we will profile one of the greatest women mushers during the 1960’s and 70’s which so many great mushers followed her lead such as Libby Riddles, Susan Butcher and Dee Dee Jonrowe just to name a few.

In the coming weeks we have a very special series airing on the show. We are in the initial talks with a true sled dog historian, Nancy Cowan and she will be joining us for a couple of shows to talk about ‘Doc’ Lombard and others that influenced this sport and made it what it is today.

Listen to Mush You Huskies: Jean Bryar

Jean Bryar became the foremost woman sled dog driver in the world during the sixties and seventies. Although her husband, Keith, is remembered as the third factor in the Lombard-Belford-Bryar hegemony, Jean was no backseat member of the Bryar team. She worked her way through the New England racing circuit, usually finishing near the top against some of the toughest competition New England has ever had. Having developed one of the best Siberian Husky racing teams in the Northeast, the Bryar’s made the big jump to Alaska with the other New England competitors in the early sixties. They, too, were entranced by the abilities of the Alaskan dogs, and in 1962 they bought a superb example of this racing husky, a leader named Brandy. They paid $1001.00 for him.

During the next four seasons Keith and Jean both drove Brandy at the head of the team that won several of the most important sled dog races in North America. In 1963 they captured the Eastern International at Quebec, the World Championship at Laconia and the Women’s North American Championship at Fairbanks. In Alaska in 1962, 1963 and 1964, Jean paralleled “Doc” Lombard’s wins in the men’s North American with wins of her own in the women’s.

Following Keith Bryar’s successful bid for the Men’s North American Championship in 1965 and his subsequent retirement from racing, Jean Bryar maintained the Norvik Kennels in Center Harbor, New Hampshire and expanded her racing schedule. Coordinating her training and racing talents with those of another champion driver and dog musher, Dick Moulton, Jean went on to secure her own reputation in the sporting world, selecting only the most challenging professional races for their teams. Bryar and Moulton left well-defined tracks wherever they competed.

Bryar had the determination and flexibility of an all-time great sled dog driver. In her first try at the North American, for example, Bryar’s lead dog was of a breed never before known to qualify for such a position, a small longhaired Border Collie. She tended to pamper her dogs a little more than some of her colleague’s thought was necessary, but her achievement as a racer and trainer justified her techniques. Energetic and personable, Bryar was completely dedicated to her dogs. During the off-season she managed her kennel and worked as a real estate agent. When the cool mornings of fall arrived it was back to the business of training puppies and stretching the veteran’s muscles for a new racing season, leaving her work as a realtor to the warmer weather.

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular, Mush You Huskies Radio Show